Zoho, the cloud-based enterprise software company based out of California, has today unveiled its latest innovation – Zoho Desk. The company claims that it is the industry’s first context-aware help desk software. The highlight of this new product is the fact that it has been developed by a team of engineers from Tenkasi, which is a small rural town located in the foothills of Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu.

Commenting on the launch of the product, Mr. Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corporation, says,

Zoho has challenged conventional wisdom so many times in its history. We built the first software products from India when IT services were the rage and established them in the global market. We are now showcasing something that has never been done before: the first software product created in rural India, world-class in its refinement, competing with the best.

Vembu takes us back in time, about five years back, to talk about this initiative of setting up a development center in the beautiful and greenery-laden rural surroundings. The Tensaki office, where Zoho Desk has been built, started out with three engineers but has since grown to accommodate a team of over 150 people. He followed this path to prove that a company doesn’t require plush surroundings and extensive amenities to build out a great product. Only the passion and determiniation of its employees can lead to creation of ground-breaking innovations.

We believe rural talent should not have to leave home to find opportunity. Our broken urbanisation model creates severely overcrowded and polluted megacities and denudes rural areas of talent. That is why what Zoho Tenkasi is doing matters,

adds Vembu.

Making our way back to Zoho Desk, this is the sixth product launch from the company this year. This help desk software is aimed at making customer support feel more natural, intutive and right within reach without any hassels. It uses customer data from past interactions and from other Zoho products, like Zoho CRM and Zoho Project. This data helps Zoho Desk better organise tickets and intelligently present info to enable the agent to understand your problem and resolve it effeciently. The core features of the product are as under:

Work Modes: Customer interactions are prioritized in real-time based on various factors including response due-time, priority, and customer type. It alwys diverts your attention to tickets that need your immediate attention.

Unified Response Editor: Inside a ticket, as mentioned above, the software provides past conversations and customer info from Zoho CRM to help agents serve them effeciently.

Headquarters: It provides customer service managers with a detailed analysis of a customer’s experience by showing trends like interactions, customer happiness ratings, negative feedback and long interaction threads all in one signle window.

Agent Scorecard: This dashboard enables agents to gain access to metrics such as average response and resolution time, number of open and closed tickets, and happiness ratings to monitor their own performance.

Team Feed: This feature enables agents to access a Facebook-style news feed and collaborate with other agents to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Zoho Desk is available to anyone who wishes to better manage their customer interactions. Like every other Zoho product, this also works on the freemium model. The service is free to use for up to 10 users but the company will charge ₹720 per user a month for the professional edition. Whereas users will need to shell out ₹1,500 per user a month for the enterprise edition of the software.